


Heaven Restores You in Life

by rabidchild67



Category: White Collar
Genre: First Time, Hurt/Comfort, Immortality, Multi, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 19:09:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabidchild67/pseuds/rabidchild67
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neal is immortal. This leads to a lot of complications.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven Restores You in Life

**Author's Note:**

> There is a lot of character death here, but none of it is permanent.
> 
> Title is a lyric from the song "Evil" by Interpol.

The first time Neal Caffrey died was in 1918, and it nearly ended him… 

His beloved wife Josie succumbed in the first wave of Spanish flu to hit Boston. She was always such a strong person – his rock, his center. She’d survived the harrowing birth of their daughter Cora the year before, so to think of something as trifling as a cold taking her away from him – well, it was the very definition of the word unthinkable, and that was the truth of it. But the speed with which the disease claimed her was frightening – she was dead within three days. And Cora, poor, always-frail Cora, had not survived the death of her mother for long. 

Neal wasn’t sure if it was the grief or the flu that claimed him, but when he revived, he found himself in a pine box in a church, in preparation for a mass funeral for members of their parish. He was alone, thankfully – it was nearly 5:00 am – but he couldn’t take the time to give thanks to God, wouldn’t talk to God for decades, actually, not until after Kate’s death, because he was too busy cursing Him for the fate that left him alone and bereft.

The second time Neal died, he was serving on board the _USS Oklahoma_ at Pearl Harbor in 1941. He had a position as a gunner – had joined the navy the year before in a misguided effort to try to do something with his life – and had been awakened from a deep sleep in his bunk by the sound of explosions and screams. He was running desperately to his post, trying to defend his ship, when he found himself nearly cut in half by the tracers from the smaller aircraft strafing the decks of the battleship. He remembers the ship going down, and he remembers reviving sometime later, floating in the water. The men who pulled him out just thought he’d been a survivor. They called it a miracle. Neal knew better.

The third time Neal died, it was in the arms of his closest friend, the man he would call “beloved” if he’d allow himself such luxuries, and it was in many ways the most painful. 

“Peter, no, don’t,” he said. Tried to say – the bullet lodged in his chest made it hard to breathe, to speak.

“Neal, what did you do that for?” Peter said urgently, pressing desperately against the wound. 

Pain made his vision go white and he may have screamed. He felt Peter stiffen, so he tried to calm himself. “Mayer would have… he would have…” _shot you._

“I have a vest, Neal, a vest.”

“Oh.” _Oh yeah, that was stupid._

“Medics’ll be here soon.”

“It’s OK, it’ll be OK.” Neal tried to shush Peter, make him understand that he shouldn’t worry for him. But his arms had gone numb and he couldn’t really feel anything anymore. That was never good.

“Neal, please, stay with me. Stay.” 

“Peter…” _Don’t grieve for me._

“Please Neal, don’t leave me, I love you, don’t go.”

“I’m sorry,” Neal thought he said before it all went black.

\----

Neal revived to find himself naked and shivering, lying on a tray in a locker at the morgue. He supposed it beat a coffin buried underground, but not by much. At least there was light – shining through from the room outside. The space was tight, but he managed to lift his arms along his sides and over his head. He worked his fingertips through the space above his head – the cracks along the edges of the drawer they had him stored in - and pushed ever so slightly. Luckily, the hinges of the thing were well-oiled and maintained, and there was not a lock on the drawer. He pushed it open enough for his eyes to peep out and was relieved to see he was alone.

He pushed the drawer all the way open and sat up. He winced in pain as he did it – his chest felt like he’d been hit by a car. He looked down and realized why – the Y-incision from his autopsy had left a fading mark on his chest and abdomen. He imagined they’d had to crack his ribs to retrieve the bullet, to determine cause of death. He took a deep breath and immediately regretted it – his broken ribs must have still been knitting. 

He knew he must go and be quick about it. He noticed the toe tag on his right foot and removed it, jumped down from the drawer and took stock of the occupants of the other drawers arrayed to his right and left. He found a John Doe of his approximate size that had been there for weeks and switched the tags followed by the labels on the outside of the drawers. He resolved to make sure his next will specified a closed coffin, and immediately regretted the alarm the disappearance of his “remains” would cause his loved ones when the switch was discovered. 

He turned to leave, and his bare foot slapping down on the tile floor made him realize he had another problem – he was completely, 100%, bare-assed naked. “Crap,” he said and looked around. There was a lab coat strewn across a chair against the wall that he picked up gratefully. Down the hall he found a staff locker room, and it was the work of a moment to pick the locks on some of them with a paperclip he found on the employee bulletin board. He found sneakers that fit in the second locker, and scrubs that fit him in the fourth. Ten minutes later, he was outside, skirting the edges of the building and trying to get his bearings for where in the city he was. He used the five dollars he found in the pocket of the lab coat to buy a one-trip pass on the subway, and headed uptown toward his former residence.

\----

Neal thanked whatever twist of fate made him revive in the middle of the night, and then the other one that put June out of town this week. He broke into the mansion easily enough, his goal to pack a few essentials that no one would miss and then to get the hell out of there. He mounted the stairs quickly, let himself into his apartment and nearly dropped dead again from a heart attack when he spotted Moz sitting slouched at his table, legs stretched in front of him, blinking morosely at the two empty bottles of red wine in front of him.

Moz screamed.

“Mozzie, Jesus!” 

“What the fuck!” Mozzie surged to his feet, the chair toppling over behind him. 

“Let me explain!”

Moz took a step back as Neal advanced on him, hands spread out in front of him. “You’re dead, I saw you myself.”

“I know, and I’m sorry.”

“Dead, Neal!” Moz had his hands on his head, then dropped them. Neal was struck by how lost he suddenly looked and he wished there was something he could do about it. “You died,” Moz whispered, removing his glasses. “You left me.” There were tears on his cheeks and he looked like he was going to pass out. He probably felt like he was going to pass out, because he plopped himself down onto the floor with a moan.

Neal rushed over to him and crouched down beside him, a hand between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry, Moz,” he repeated, and Moz promptly puked on Neal's shoes. 

\----

The thing is, he can’t be seen now. He can’t be caught – no one can know about him and his situation. It happened once before and it was… bad.

Neal tried to explain it to Moz, tried to convey his need for urgency, but Moz’s brain might have gone offline a little. “You’re not dead,” he kept repeating, and Neal knew it was because he was completely shit-faced, not to mention in shock, but it was still annoying.

“Yes, Moz. I don’t die, I can’t die. I explained.”

“You’re not dead.” Moz muttered and keeled over on the couch. 

Neal settled a blanket around his friend and went to pack. He grabbed an old canvas duffel he’d never used – it still had the logo of some now-defunct bank on the side, and he knew no one would notice if it was gone – and stuffed it with his second-best things. Underwear, shirts, jeans, socks. Toiletries he left – there were Walgreens everywhere, weren’t there? – but he did take the brush he liked with the soft bristles that didn’t make his hair all fly-away. He was fondly fingering one of Byron’s old tie clips when he spotted a picture on the dresser of him with Peter and Elizabeth. 

“I think I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow,” he whispered and picked it up. It was a picture of the three of them taken right after Peter and El had renewed their wedding vows. Interestingly, he was standing right in the middle, with the Burkes bracketing him like a pair of bookends. Happy smiles, full of hope for the future. _Jesus._

He ran a fingertip over Peter’s face, the crinkles his eyes made when he smiled, and nearly lost it. Deciding it couldn’t hurt, he threw the picture, frame and all, into the duffel and turned to contemplate shoe options. 

When he emerged from his closet, Moz was sitting up and blinking at him. The imprint of the couch’s fabric was pressed into the side of this face, all red and moist from sweat or tears or both, and the look in his eyes was more than an accusation – it was a condemnation. “You’re leaving.”

“I’m supposed to be dead, Moz, I can’t just find a new apartment and pretend it never happened.”

“Were you going to tell me where you were going?”

“Truthfully, no.”

“That’s cold, man.”

Neal just stared at him. Of course it was, this whole thing was, _but what the fuck?_

“Need me to arrange a funeral?” Moz offered, and Neal really didn’t deserve him as a friend. 

“Thanks. There’s a guy who looks nothing like me with my name on him. Cremation might be a good option.”

“You have papers?”

“Yeah.” Neal invented identity farming. This time around, he’ll be Jonathan Craig.

“Take care of yourself, then.”

_Well, shit._

\----

This is what got him found out the first time he died – the sticking around. 

On his way to the airport, Neal made the cabbie stop on DeKalb Avenue – it was totally on the way to JFK, right? They sat at the corner and he watched the Burke house for fifteen minutes, until some lady on the curb started banging on the hood of the car and yelling at him for hogging the cab. He got to the front of the line at the British Airways counter to buy a ticket and then bailed. 

Later, at the Airport Marriott over a club sandwich and _all the alcohol_ from the minibar, he sat with the picture of himself, Peter and El, his mind emptied of thought, and just stared.

When he went to his own funeral, he told himself it was just morbid curiosity, that he was being careful, that no one would see him and it would be OK. No big deal.

Never let it be said that Moz didn’t have an appreciation for the ceremonial. Neal's funeral service was a full-on mass, complete with the sacrament, water, wine, altar boys. It went on for over an hour, but was surprisingly well-attended. Neal sat in a luncheonette across the street from the church and watched the comings and goings – even Ruiz showed up, with a surprisingly hot wife in tow. 

Peter and Elizabeth were the first to arrive and the last to leave; he escorted her to the car with a hand at her elbow, settled her inside and then closed the door gently. Then Peter stood there, both hands on the roof of the Taurus and just _paused_. He tilted his face to the sky and blinked up at the sun, and the look on his face – well, Neal felt like an intruder, really, to witness such stark, unadulterated grief. 

He’d never wanted to talk to Peter Burke more. Sit across his desk from him and those steady brown eyes and just _explain_. 

He couldn’t, of course. Couldn’t tell the man he’d long considered his closest friend – the person he’d confessed more to than any other – his ultimate secret. Because what was the point? Neal stepped into a new identity and a new city roughly every twenty years, by necessity. It was a good plan – twenty years was about the point at which the fact that he did not age started to cause him trouble when people noticed. 

He thought he’d have more time, dammit. He thought he’d have another eight years before he had to deal with all of this. Eight years’ time with people he’d grown close to, doing work he’d come to value. 

More time with Peter, with Elizabeth. Peter, who’d challenged his mind like no other person in his long life, not Kate, not even Josie, as desperately and as deeply as he’d loved her. And Elizabeth, who had always been kind to him, had always supported him, even when Peter couldn’t. 

If he had more time, he’d be able to prepare himself to disengage, get into the right headspace. Create some distance. 

He needed to be sure they’d be OK. 

Because the fact was that Peter loved him, and he couldn’t ignore it. And Peter’d actually confessed it to him. Hadn’t he said that as Neal lay dying? As he _thought_ Neal was dying? He loved him. Neal knew that already, had known for a while. It was pretty obvious from all the breaks he’d given Neal, all the chances, the looks when he thought Neal hadn’t noticed. Neal appreciated it, he did, but he wouldn’t reciprocate, as much as he wanted to. As much as he had deep feelings for Peter Burke. And his wife too, if that could be believed.

He loved them. And he wanted them to be OK.

Which was what got him into trouble, because he had to stick around and see them, couldn’t leave, couldn’t bear to. 

So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Peter found him, not really. Except that it totally was.

\----

The first time Neal died, he had been unprepared, had no idea what to do, so he haunted his life. This wasn’t hard – the influenza outbreak nearly emptied the city, and the people that remained behind kept to their houses. He holed up in his abandoned home, first purging it of anything reminding him of his wife and daughter, and tried not to suffocate on his grief. 

That lasted about a week.

Wondering if perhaps there were others like him – maybe it was a side effect, maybe others had also survived – he spent his nights on the outskirts of cemeteries, waiting. No one emerged from the mass graves the city council had eventually been forced to resort to, at least no one that hadn’t gone in on his own steam. He next visited hospitals and the churches where the sick had been taken, their makeshift morgues not giving anything away to him. 

He was a rational man, a Yale man, and after what he’d seen in the war, he no longer believed in resurrection, despite what the Bible and Father John had drilled into his brain when he was a boy. But still he had no answers and so he thought that if he could just pick up the thread of his life again, he might find one.

Until he ran into someone who knew him.

“Tris?” 

He turned to see his younger brother Ethan standing behind him on the street corner, a look of utter shock on his face that Tristan – for that was his given name: Tristan Francis Hennessey – knew was mirrored on his own.

“N-no,” Tristan tried to deny, but he didn’t yet have the conman’s facility for lying instilled in him, not yet. He was an art history professor, for God’s sake.

“I can’t believe it,” Ethan stammered.

“You have me confused with someone else, excuse me,” Tristan said and pushed past him. 

But Ethan wouldn’t be deterred, and he pursued him. “Why are you going? What are you doing?” he called after him, but Tristan slipped away, and he ducked inside a doorway until the younger man passed him. When he emerged, he’d already made the decision to leave the city – the risk of being exposed now clear – and it pained him to have to do it, but there was no other way. 

As he was about to head toward home, he again caught sight of Ethan across the road – he must have doubled back. Again the chase was on, and Tristan turned to run.

“Tris!” 

Tristan could hear his brother calling, even as he made his escape. But then, behind him he heard a great shrieking of metal and a crash, the sound so loud he skidded to a halt. He almost knew what it was before he turned, a sick dropping feeling in his gut – an automobile had come from around the corner and Ethan, not seeing it, had fallen under its wheels.

Tristan ran to the scene, along with what few people were on the street. Someone called for a doctor, and the driver stood beside his vehicle with his hands on his head, looking helpless. All of this Tristan would remember later; for now, he only had eyes for his fallen brother, lying broken in the middle of the road.

“Ethan!” he said urgently, a hand on his brother’s chest. He couldn’t help but flash back to their childhood then, when they shared a bed in the tiny, hot attic room at their grandmother’s house, and Ethan would always sleep too long and be late for school. “Ethan.”

Ethan opened his eyes, their blue color clouded by pain, but he responded to his brother’s voice. “It _was_ you,” he said with difficulty. 

“Shh, Ethan, please, be quiet now.”

“I thought I was going crazy,” Ethan said, then coughed, and a fine spray of blood marred his pale skin. “I saw you yesterday, and I thought I was crazy, so I came back here, looking for you.”

“No, Ethan, no.”

Ethan’s face contorted in agony then, and Tristan pulled him into his lap, held on to him. He’d seen many men in this condition in the trenches in France, he recognized a dying man when he saw it. 

“Tris,” Ethan said, his fingertips brushing Tristan’s chin. “Tris.” And then we was gone.

Tristan stayed with him as the ambulance came, stayed with him at the morgue until they made him leave – they had no more room for grieving relatives, not during an epidemic. So he stayed outside until the mortician came, and he watched his brother’s funeral from the back of the church, and he sat at his graveside for two more days, but there was no sign that Ethan would revive as Tristan had, no sign that maybe this was some family curse that Tristan knew nothing about. 

When he’d cried all he was going to for his brother, Tristan changed his name to George Donald Smith and moved to New York for the first time, and taught himself how to play the stock market.

\----

This time when Neal haunted his life, it wasn’t because he couldn’t leave it, but because he was worried. Or so he told himself.

He spent three weeks following Peter Burke, tailing him like some sort of clichéd private detective. He couldn’t explain his morbid fascination, and so he didn’t try. He told himself he wanted to be sure Peter was OK, that the sight of him grieving was something to worry about. It was not an unconscious attempt to hang on to a life and people he’d grown to love too much. Not at all.

So this time, he used the many skills he’d honed over years in the Game, the ability to melt into a crowd, the light step he’d developed, the keen eyesight that persisted despite his advanced years. Except he apparently underestimated the ability of a trained FBI agent to spot a tail.

It was morning, the rush hour was in full swing, and he’d retired to the Starbucks on the corner across Federal Plaza near where Peter parked the Taurus. It was a good spot – if Peter headed out for a case, he’d see him get in the Taurus; when he left for lunch at the little Greek place where they used to meet Elizabeth, he’d be able to keep an eye on him. Right now, he thought he’d have a few hours before any of that was likely to happen, so he settled into a seat at the window with an iced coffee to watch the crowd of people walk by. 

And then the bus that had stopped in front of the shop pulled away, and Peter was standing on the sidewalk across the street staring right at him. 

Neal's mouth went dry. And then it began to water, because he thought he might vomit. And then he stood and ducked out the side entrance, sprinting down Worth Street. He made it all the way to Columbus Park before he thought to look back, and he saw that Peter had kept pace with him, despite the heavy foot traffic. Neal headed for the park’s entrance, but the screech of car tires behind him brought him up short and he flashed back to that horrible day nearly a hundred years ago. “Ethan, no,” he let slip and turned around. And there was Peter Burke, who had indeed run into the middle of the street, only instead of being in danger of getting run down, he’d pulled his badge and was forcing all of the traffic to make way for him. 

Neal watched, frozen, as Peter strode towards him. His brows were furrowed, his face pale, shocked. Before Neal knew it, Peter was standing in front of him, staring into his eyes in disbelief. “Peter –“ he began.

“Son of a _bitch_!” Peter said before clocking him right across the jaw.

“Ow,” Neal told him.

“What did you do?”

“I –“

“I watched you die, I saw you _autopsied, Neal_. How – _what did you do?_ ”

“I died,” Neal said simply, flinching as Peter came at him again, only this time, Peter threw his arms around him and pulled him close, squeezing so tight, Neal almost couldn’t breathe.

“I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was dreaming. You’re real, right? You’re real?” He released Neal, but put his hands on his upper arms, squeezing lightly as if touching was the proof he needed.

“I’m real. And I’m here. And I’m sorry. Because I have to go now.”

\----

He didn’t go, of course. He couldn’t. When faced with an emotionally charged Peter Burke, you don’t just walk away. So Neal found himself sitting across the Burkes’ dining room table from his former partner, staring at a point on the wall just over Peter’s head as he told him the truth. All of it.

“You’re immortal?” All of Peter’s statements were sounding like questions.

“I think so, maybe. Yeah.”

“You think so?”

“So far, I’ve been unable to stay dead.” He’d tried to figure it out, really, had traveled to Tibet and India and China in the 70’s to try to find answers, or more people like him, but mostly people just looked at him funny when he asked.

“So you do die? I mean, it’s not like you’re pretending?”

“I die, yes, and it’s scary and painful, and horrible. And then I, I don’t know, regenerate or something. I can’t explain it because I don’t know. I just wake up and I’m fine. It’s only happened three times.”

“How old are you?”

“Well, a lady hardly…” He caught Peter’s expression and became serious again. “One hundred and twenty-four.”

Peter flinched at the knowledge, but his face betrayed no other emotion, and he continued the interrogation. “Is Neal Caffrey your real name?”

“No. It’s my,” Neal did some mental calculations, “sixth. I think. The 60’s and 70’s were kind of a blur, actually. I change my identity every twenty years, move to a different city, start over.”

“How very efficient.”

“You do what you do. Look, is the interrogation over, because I really should be going. Now that people know my secret, it complicates a lot of things.”

“’People’? Who else knows?”

“I ran into Mozzie the day after I ‘died’.” Neal actually employed air quotes when he said that and wanted to kill himself – if only he could. He settled for a sigh.

“Mozzie knows?” Peter said, and the hurt in his voice made the knot in Neal’s gut twist even more.

“Not by design. I made my first mistake by going home to get a few things before leaving town. He was at my apartment.” 

This seemed to mollify Peter, and he nodded. Neal stood. “Will I ever see you again?”

“No. It’s better this way, trust me.”

“Better for who?” 

Neal ignored that. “I have to go. Thank you for everything, Peter, sincerely. You and El have been such great friends to me, and I’ll always remember it.”

Peter stood as well. “So you just skip town now? It’s that easy?”

“None of it’s easy, Peter. But I don’t have a choice. I’m supposed to be dead. I can’t just show up at the office Monday morning and pretend that I’m not.”

“But you can just leave me? Leave us? You once said we were all family.”

Neal closed his eyes. “Don’t make this harder.”

“I told you I loved you.”

He had to go and make it harder. Neal had no answer for that – what would telling Peter he felt the same way accomplish? – so he walked to the front door.

“Neal, wait!” Peter said, maneuvering himself around the table, trying to chase him, but Neal reached the door before he could catch up, and opened it.

Elizabeth stood there, key at the ready. When she saw Neal, her eyes widened. Then she screamed. Then she fainted.

“Fucking hell,” Neal muttered, catching her.

\----

“Fucking hell,” Elizabeth muttered. “Did I just faint?” she asked her husband.

Peter adjusted the cool cloth on her forehead. “Yeah, hon.”

“I thought I saw Neal in our house.” Her eyes moved around the room then, and caught Neal where he stood near the fireplace with his hands in his pockets looking like a deer caught in headlights. He felt like a deer caught in headlights – what the hell was he supposed to do now?

Elizabeth recoiled against the couch and her eyes filled with tears. Peter followed her gaze to Neal and back and took one of her hands. “Hon, Neal is… he’s here.” She sat up and started to cry. 

Neal fled to the kitchen and began pacing back and forth. He heard Peter and El’s muffled voices in the other room, but pointedly ignored them. He was wondering if it would be bad form if he slipped out the back door, when he turned around to find the Burkes standing in front of him with their arms around each other. 

“I – I can’t believe it,” Elizabeth said, her voice throaty; tears were smeared across her cheeks, still falling.

“I know, I don’t know what to say,” Neal began, but as he did, she walked up to him, snaked her arms around his waist and just _held him._ “El,” he began again, but she just squeezed him tighter, rubbing at his back with her right hand, and the feel of her arms around him was so warm, and so welcoming, and so _what he needed in that moment,_ that soon he found himself crying too. He dropped his arms around her shoulders and hung on for dear life, and wept like a freaking baby.

The next thing he knew, Peter had joined them, had taken them both in this strong arms, and Neal would have thought his added strength would have calmed him down, but unfortunately, all of the emotion and tension of the last weeks began to be released along with his tears, and he found he couldn’t stop. Before he knew it, Elizabeth had taken his face in her tiny hands, stood up on her tiptoes and kissed him. On the mouth. 

_Shit._

“What did you do th-that for?” he blubbered.

“You looked like you needed it, sweetie.”

And then Peter was pulling his head against his shoulder, and the two of them just stood there and _held him_ , and damn it if he hadn’t felt so protected and safe in maybe a hundred years.

Eventually, after more time had passed than he’d ever admit to anyone, Neal calmed down and stopped crying. He sniffled and he snotted and he was sure his face was all red and blotchy, and it _was undignified_. He wanted to find a dark hole to crawl into. Except that Elizabeth led him by the hand over to the kitchen island and sat him down on a stool, and Peter handed him a handkerchief from his pocket (linen, freshly laundered), kept a comforting hand between Neal's shoulder blades. And El made them all some tea and served cookies (the kind with the dried-up jelly in the middle), and it was all so wonderful, he would have cried again if he’d had the emotional capacity for it.

They all sat down and drank their tea. And then El asked Neal to help her clean up, and then Peter asked him to come take Satch for a walk. They walked to a nearby park, and Neal kicked at the fallen leaves along the paths, and it was just so comfortable. And when they got back to the house, El handed them both glasses of red wine, and she was cooking her famous ravioli with [roasted red pepper sauce](http://rabidchild67.livejournal.com/42340.html), and she asked if Neal would make the salad. 

Before Neal knew it, it was after 10:00 and they’d distracted him long enough and often enough, and he should not have been surprised to find himself sitting back against the couch with his shoes off, drunk on too much red wine and staring at the ceiling. Except he was surprised. And his eyes were moist again, but it was totally because of the dust in the house and not the fact he felt so… _at home._

The light murmur of El and Peter talking as they cleaned up in the kitchen combined with the wine made him drowsy.

“Come on, it’s late. Time for bed,” El said, suddenly there and taking his hand and pulling him to his feet. He let her, let himself be led up the stairs, looked forward to sleeping in a comfortable bed in a _home_ and not the stiff, starchy sheets at the hotel. When he looked up and saw that she’d led him to her bedroom and not the guest room, he blinked at her uncertainly in the low light from the bedside lamps. He jumped as Peter entered the room behind him, taking off his watch, opening and closing drawers.

“Wh..?” Neal said intelligently.

“Time for bed,” Peter said casually and pressed a pair of pajama bottoms against his chest.

“Bu…” Neal replied.

“It’s just sleeping, honey,” El said, standing there, suddenly, in an old Harvard t-shirt that was clearly Peter’s, the worn cotton hanging to mid-thigh. She sat on the bed and began to rub lotion on her knees and elbows. The water in the bathroom down the hall came on as Peter brushed his teeth. Neal took a step backward. “We’re not going to force you,” El said seriously, “but we have talked about this before, and if you think I haven’t noticed how you and Peter look at each other, and at me, well, a woman has eyes, Neal.”

“Hmm.” Apparently, both he and Peter failed completely at hiding their feelings.

“We want this,” she said plainly. “And having a second chance at it – at you – well, I don’t have to tell you what that means.”

At that moment, Peter entered the room, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and Neal blinked slowly. 

“If you don’t, that’s fine,” she continued, “but the only thing stopping it would be you.”

“I’m drunk,” he muttered to himself, and walked to the bathroom.

“They’re drunk,” he said as he relieved himself and got changed and brushed his teeth. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked as shell-shocked as he felt.

“We’re drunk,” he whispered as he stood in their doorway again. Peter sat on the right side of the bed, working a crossword puzzle, El curled up beside him with an iPad in her hands. He crossed the room and got into the bed, sitting stiffly with his back against the headboard, hands in his lap. 

Eventually, El handed her iPad to Peter and he put the puzzle down. “Should we get to sleep?” El said. “It’s been an unexpectedly trying day.”

“OK,” Neal answered too quickly. He lay down on his side facing away from them, as close to the side of the bed as he could get without falling off. As much as he had fantasized about a moment such as this, experiencing it was freaking him out. He felt nervous, and awkward, and maybe the ravioli wasn’t sitting quite right on top of the entire bottle of red wine he may or may not have consumed. 

He didn’t know what was going on behind him – intimate murmurs between man and wife, rooted in years of familiarity and intimacy. The bed was moving slightly as the couple settled down; Neal imagined them spooning. He suddenly felt very hot. He felt a hand on his hip then, light and reassuring. “’Night, Neal,” Peter said.

Neal threw the covers off and fled to the guest room.

\----

Then the Burkes became like a pair of silk-lined handcuffs Neal didn’t have the will to pick.

He slept fitfully – thank the wine for that – and when he woke the next morning, the sun hadn’t yet risen. But the birds had.

 _Shirr-up! Shirr-up! Shirr-up!_ the robins outside his window sang cheerfully.

“Shut the fuck up,” he grumbled and got out of bed. He was hung over and cranky and sometimes when you get everything you ever wanted, the _timing is just wrong_.

He dressed quickly in the bathroom and walked down the steps quietly, totally not intending to escape undetected except for the fact that it was true.

“Morning!” Elizabeth called from the kitchen as he was bending to retrieve his shoes from beside the couch where he’d left them, and he reluctantly walked down the short hall to greet her. “I’m making pancakes.” 

Of course she was – it was a Saturday, these things happened. She had all the ingredients laid out on the counter, and she was currently loading up the beans in the coffee grinder.

“Look at that, blueberries,” he said nearly enthusiastically.

She beamed at him.

“You’re an early riser,” he observed. 

“I could say the same thing about you. Did I bust you trying to duck out on us?” How could she be so chipper? And, like, psychic?

“That would be –“

“The smart thing to do. You can’t be found out, I get that. But I was thinking that maybe we could make this work.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I know that I want to try, and that you’re smart, and so is Peter, and we can figure it out.” She pushed the button on the grinder and grinned at him. “Pull up a seat – set a spell,” she said and chucked the ground coffee into the French press.

He sat and watched her, open-mouthed, as she bustled about, mixing up the batter, heating the pan, pouring the coffee. She still wore the t-shirt from the night before, and her nipples tented the soft cotton like they had no business doing. Neal swallowed. It had been so long since Sara, and there was no way he’d fooled himself into thinking that had been love. It had been a deep-seated like, for sure. But Elizabeth – she was the kind of woman men killed for.

“You want blueberries in yours?” she asked, melting a pat of butter in the pan. She made him a stack of pancakes and handed it to him on a warmed plate with maple syrup and a glass of fresh orange juice. She leaned heavily on the kitchen island, her feet kicking up into the air, and watched him eat, occasionally taking a bite from his plate with her fork.

“Aren’t you having any?”

“It’s funner from your plate.”

“’Funner’?”

“It’s a word – look it up.”

Peter came down five minutes later and sat on the stool next to Neal’s, and she repeated the performance, though she dropped a pancake on the floor and bent to pick it up before Satchmo could, _and Jesus tap-dancing Christ, did Peter get this every Saturday?_

“More coffee?” Peter offered, watching him watch Elizabeth and actually laughing.

Neal felt dizzy.

When breakfast was done, he found himself at a loss as to his next move. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, or say, here,” he admitted. 

El came over and stood between Peter’s knees and he wrapped her in his arms, rested his chin on her shoulder and looked at Neal seriously. “Neither do we.”

“I know that I want to be with you,” Neal began, not really knowing he meant it until he said it. “But I can’t, I don’t…” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m going to say this all at once, so please just let me spit it out. I don’t form attachments, not really. Because I always know I’m going to have to leave someday, and I can’t… I know I’m going to have to hurt people, and so I don’t.” He opened his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You don’t want to _be_ hurt,” El observed, blue eyes large and serious.

“That’s not what I said–“

“You know you can’t die, and so you don’t want to watch it happen to anyone else, to someone you love. You’ll live forever, and so you think you’re doomed to face it alone. But Neal, sweetie, isn’t it lonely?”

He felt his throat clench. “Like you have no idea, Elizabeth.”

“Well, can’t we just forget about it, then?”

“I don’t understand.”

“A lot of people say you should live each day like it’s your last. What if you, Neal Caffrey, lived each day like it’s your first?” 

With that, she reached out and took his hand, pulled him to her and kissed him. She reached up and rested her hand at the nape of his neck, her fingers playing with the short hairs there as she opened her mouth, her tongue a little invader against his lips, licking his teeth. Peter, still behind her, leaned forward and rested his hands on Neal's hips, pulling him in closer. Neal opened his eyes and Peter smiled at him, brown eyes crinkling with what Neal could only call mischief, and he regretted – oh, how he regretted the grief he’d been responsible for putting in those eyes. Breaking the kiss with Elizabeth, Neal leaned over her shoulder to catch Peter’s mouth with his own and the contact was at once electric and gentle and loving and everything he’d never thought kissing Peter Burke would be like.

El turned so that she was standing sideways between them, and placed a hand on each of their faces, encouraging the kiss, smiling up at them. Both men reached an arm around her back, entwined against the other, and they stood like that, kissing in turns, for several minutes. At last, El broke them up, looked at Peter and it was like a silent agreement was made. They each took one of Neal's hands and led him up the stairs to their bedroom. 

Neal reeled.

Yeah, he’ll admit it, the possibility of making love with Peter and Elizabeth Burke made him actually fucking swoon. Peter noticed – because he always noticed everything – and laid a steadying hand on his arm. And then he kissed Neal again, and then he and Elizabeth got him undressed with surprising efficiency, and they were on their knees in front of Neal and, well.

The sight of both Peter and Elizabeth mouthing at Neal's impossibly hard cock was a sight he won’t soon forget. It was a sensation that almost made him reel again, and so he moved back until his legs hit their bed and he could sit down. Things got a little bit easier for him in the staying-upright department, but then Peter had to go and blow his mind by literally swallowing his dick, and he didn’t mean to, he really didn’t want to be fucking Peter Burke’s mouth, and he was going to have to stop referring to him by his full name in his mind soon, and He couldn’t keep his hips still, and then he was coming, and Peter took it all, just swallowed it all and then he sat back on his heels, and kissed his wife with Neal's taste still in his mouth and if Neal hadn’t already spent himself, he’d be coming like a goddamn geiser.

Neal lay on their bed propped up on his elbows, watching them stand and kiss each other, and El lifted her leg and began to rub her foot against Peter’s knee. He lifted her then, easily, and she locked her ankles around his waist and he fumbled down between them to push the elastic waistband of his gym shorts down, push the thin wisp of fabric that was her panties aside so that she could slide herself down on his massive erection. She gasped, and then she levered herself up with her arms on his shoulders and came down again, and Peter made a sound like a moan that was strangely silent and cut off. Neal watched as El did it again and again, mesmerized, but eventually Peter must have tired, because he maneuvered her around toward the bed and laid her down gently on her back. She scooted away from him to undress and get a better position on the bed, and he pulled his own clothes off and watched her, a predatory expression in his eyes that Neal couldn’t wait to see trained on him. 

El flipped on her side then, and kissed Neal lightly on the mouth. “Sit up against the headboard?” she prompted. He did as she asked and she sat between his thighs, her back against his chest and his dick cradled in the hollow where her back sloped into the curve of her ass. She held her arms out to her husband. Smiling, Peter got onto the bed, pressed her thighs open and began to lap at her pussy, pressing his tongue against her clit until she shivered. The motion made her tits quiver deliciously, and Neal reached his right hand around to tweak her nipple tentatively. 

“Oh, fuck, that’s perfect,” she breathed, and turned her head so he could kiss her. 

Peter shoved two fingers inside her then, and she gasped as he started a slow, steady rhythm, pressing against her G-spot as he worried his tongue against her clit, hard, until she was squirming. At last, she clenched her thighs shut around his head and held him against her, tight, smothering, and held her breath as her orgasm hit her with a force that made her shake all over. 

The sight of it, and the sensation of a warm, vibrant, _vibrating_ woman in his lap soon had Neal's cock’s interest piqued again. When El released him, Peter got up on his knees and kissed her mouth, her neck, down to her breasts. “Oh, God, my husband gives the best head!” she enthused, and Neal had to agree. She leaned forward into Peter then, reaching behind her back to grasp Neal's thickening dick in her hand, and she began to stroke him as Peter sucked at each of her nipples in turn. 

“Daddy’s turn,” she cooed after a few minutes, sitting up and grabbing Peter’s face between her hands to kiss him. 

Peter groaned. “I asked you never to call me that again, El,” he admonished and she giggled as she turned around. Neal found himself smiling at the shared joke, and marveling at the easy way they had with each, and wanting more of it for himself.

El turned herself over then, and got on her elbows and knees. Shimmying her hips a little, she invited Peter to fuck her from behind. The sight of her tits swaying, nipples nearly brushing against the coverlet, almost had Neal coming again. El turned her face toward him then and smiled at him, all white teeth and quirked lips, and then her mouth was on Neal's dick again and she was _humming_. 

She stopped as Peter entered her, hands on her hips, his thick cock caused her to make an involuntary noise. He looked up at Peter, whose eyes were on what his wife was doing, but when he saw he had Neal's attention, he flicked his eyes over to Neal’s and just _smiled,_ hair sweaty and sticking out in all directions, but he looked so youthful and happy that Neal just had to kiss him right then and there.

As he did, Neal knew that he could never leave them.

\----

They literally spent the day in bed, fucking and touching and dozing in a mass of tangled limbs and sheets. At around 8:00, El made them all get out to change the bedding, and then Peter suggested a shower and then, well… they kind of messed up the new sheets too. And then Peter made them all omelets. 

Neal fell asleep with the realization that Peter and El had once more distracted him into forgetting about the ramifications of his staying, and he found he couldn’t really care about it.

Sunday morning, Neal sat in bed with his arms around his legs, head resting on his knees. El was downstairs making breakfast, Peter was in the shower, and Neal was alone for the first time in a day and a half. When he woke earlier, he found himself alone, but he didn’t feel that way. The scent of his lovers on the sheets and on his body, the warmth in the bed, the safety in their home all combined to make him feel more secure than he had in decades. He could now say he knew what it meant for a heart to swell with love. He felt like his had expanded to fill his entire chest. He swallowed against the sudden lump in his throat as Peter padded into the room, barefoot with a towel around his waist.

“You still thinking about running?” Peter asked.

“Not even a little bit,” Neal replied, and was surprised to realize it was true. Leaving – the fact that he always would, that he’d need to be prepared for it no matter what – was a constant thought in his head every day of his life. But the last day had provided whole swaths of time when he could forget. “I feel like this is some sort of time warp, and the world has been reduced to just us three.”

Peter came to sit beside him on the bed, close enough that their bodies touched, shoulders, hips, thigh. “If you stay, it can be like this forever,” he pointed out.

“I never would have thought you capable of such flights of fancy,” Neal replied, not mentioning that they each had different definitions of the word “forever.”

“I’m a romantic guy,” Peter said, snaking his arm around Neal and pulling his head over to rest on his shoulder. 

Neal melted against him – and there he was learning the meaning of yet another cliché. “I wish you were right.”

“Do we have to decide about it now?”

“I suppose not.”

On Monday morning, he woke with Elizabeth’s head on his chest and Peter’s leg flung across both of them and suddenly knew what a sex-induced stupor felt like. He lifted his head and looked around. “Peter,” he said, poking him with a toe, “it’s nearly 8:30 – shouldn’t you be getting ready for work?”

Peter lifted his head, glanced at the clock and then lay down again. “Nah. Sent Hughes an email last night – I’m under the weather.” He snuggled his face into the back of Elizabeth’s neck and she sighed. 

“You know, keeping me cowed through sexual gratification will not work,” Neal pointed out.

“We can try.”

Neal put his head down and closed his eyes, thinking that delaying the inevitable would probably bite him in the ass, but not really caring.

It came back and bit him in the ass about five hours later. 

“Agent Jones!” He heard the words ring through the house as Elizabeth opened the front door, but it was like he was watching himself, dull-witted, his reactions all out of sync with his brain, so he kept walking from the dining room to the kitchen, carrying the plates from lunch, in full view of Jones. 

Stupid sex-induced stupor.

“Holy Mary, mother of God,” Jones yelled, and there was a clatter in the vestibule as he reacted to the sight of a very alive Neal Caffrey apparently about to do the dishes in his boss’s house; he threw his arms out to the sides, took a step back in shock.

“Fucking hell,” Neal and El said in unison.

“You’re supposed to be dead!”

“It didn’t take,” Neal replied, walking to the front of the house. 

“I – I need to sit down,” Jones said, stricken.

“Sure thing, honey,” El said, taking his elbow and leading him to the couch. 

Neal closed the door and joined them, because what else was he supposed to do? He sat down on the couch opposite Jones, who looked at him with eyes wide, breathing from his mouth. Suddenly, he closed the gap between them and threw his arms around Neal. “I can’t believe it!” he said, and Neal awkwardly patted his back. When Jones sat back again, he had tears in his eyes and a happy smile on his face – an uncharacteristically emotional response from the usually stalwart agent that made Neal feel like a shit.

“I – yeah.”

“Wh-what happened? I saw the blood, Neal. I – you don’t come away from something like that!”

“I… was…”

“Undercover!” El supplied.

“Right. Top secret assignment. Had to fake dying so that I could go deep, deep undercover.”

Jones gave them both his you-can’t-fool-me-I-went-to-Harvard-Law face and Neal tried again. “In fact, I’m still undercover. Peter’s been my handler.” 

Peter, bless him, chose that very moment to come in after taking the dog for a walk. Satchmo trotted over and sat on Neal’s shoes, tongue lolling. “Jones. Hi. I see you’ve… seen Neal.”

“It’s incredible.”

“It has to stay a secret,” Peter said, face suddenly stern.

“Boss –“

“Clinton, I know I don’t have to tell you what kind of danger Neal will be in if word of this leaks to anyone. He’s been deep undercover for weeks, and we’re just _so close_ to a break in the case.”

Clinton was loyal enough to give his boss the benefit of the doubt, but his mother didn’t raise any dummies, so he still looked unconvinced. 

“All will be made clear when I come back,” Neal found himself promising, his best conman’s smile in place. Yep, he was a shit.

When Clint had gone, Neal flopped himself on the couch, boneless from the tension of that moment finally being over, and not letting himself think about the fact he’d just been outed. If only it had been Diana who’d come over to bring some files to Peter, they might have convinced her to leave it. But Clint – he was as by-the-book as Peter, probably more so, and they just couldn’t let this lie now.

“What are you doing?” Neal asked, noticing Peter had picked up his cell phone and was dialing.

“Calling Hughes. If ‘all will be made clear,’ we’d better get started on it clearing it up.”

Neal thought it might be worth dying again if he got to see the look on Reese Hughes’ face just one more time once he’d entered the Burke house that evening. Then he felt guilty – the guy was getting up there in years, maybe his ticker couldn’t handle it. 

In the end, though, Hughes was surprisingly sanguine about aiding and abetting a cover story that featured Neal being loaned out to the Secret Service to bust a counterfeiting ring in Orlando. It would take a week to fake the paperwork, which Neal spent at the Burkes’, feeling like a kid home from school with the chicken pox or something, while Peter and Elizabeth went about their lives. 

He took the opportunity to re-enter parts of his life, though, finding Moz again to explain that he was staying.

“I’m coming back,” he said to Moz as the older man entered the new Tuesday, a storage unit in Queens that was inexplicably filled with cases and cases of breakfast cereal. 

“You never left,” Moz pointed out, and how the hell did he always know these things? “Been having fun playing house with the Suits?” he asked, and Neal knew how.

“Been spying on people again?”

“A man has to fill his days,” Moz sniffed. 

After a few minutes and a promise to forge a Delacroix – he was so not looking forward to the specific coloring, the detailed brushwork; he could sense a lot of creative cursing coming on – the ice was broken, and Moz was advising him on the best way to break the news of his impending life to June.

In the end, it became surprisingly easy to slip back into his life, and he felt almost relieved the night before he was to return to the FBI, like a workaholic who’d been off on a particularly unsatisfying vacation and couldn’t wait to get back to the office.

He got a few looks as he made his way to the 21st floor, but when he entered the office, everyone stood and welcomed him with much hand-shaking and back-slapping, and he felt special and almost like a hero, except that he hadn’t done anything.

Falling back into the rhythms of the office took almost no effort, and Peter soon had him working on a mortgage fraud case that had him wondering why he came back, it was so boring. But he secretly loved it. And he not-so-secretly loved going home to Peter and El every night, because it was a magical slice of normal with a side of hot sex and he might even be happy. 

And then he died again.

\----

The case was stupid. It was another stupid Master of the Universe using creative accounting to hide financial irregularities in records so convoluted it took Jones and a team of three forensic accountants with fine-toothed combs a month to sift through them, and still they didn’t have what they needed on the guy. They sent Neal in as an art appraiser who was maybe shady enough to fence stolen Impressionists, and when Neal had broken into the stupid mark’s stupid office to plant the Trojan in the guy’s stupid pc that would secretly send all his stupid records to the FBI, the guy caught him and all hell broke loose.

Because the mark was a collector of antique swords – and you didn’t have to be a psychologist to get to the root of _that_ little fixation – and there Neal was with a cutlass, _a fucking cutlass – was the guy a goddamn pirate?_ , poking him in the back as the stupid fucker held Neal hostage against a half dozen of the Harvard crew with their Sig Sauers drawn and deadly intent etched on all of their faces.

“Come on, Samuelson, let him go. You hurt him, you go to maximum security. You let him go, it’s Club Fed,” Peter was saying soothingly.

“Fuck you, Lassen!” Samuelson raged, “yesterday you were the auditor and today you’re with the FBI?” Neal flinched at the spit that hit him on the side of his face as the man shouted; he didn’t think this could be good for the guy’s heart. Maybe he’d drop dead of a heart attack in the next minute and a half.

No such luck. Samuelson had him around the neck with one broad arm, the other had the sword pressed against the middle of his back. Neal’s body was bowed out, trying to curve away from the thing, which Samuelson had, not surprisingly, kept honed and sharp. His lower back was killing him, and he feared a cramp.

“Can we maybe just ease up a bit?” Neal suggested, and Samuelson pulled the blade off a little, took a step back. Neal straightened his spine in relief, but he misjudged; Samuelson was just maneuvering to get better leverage.

“You don’t steal from me, boy,” the man gritted in Neal’s ear, the Texas twang his wife had so patiently tried to eliminate by employing the country’s best dialect coaches coming to the fore. “No one takes what’s mine and lives.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Neal babbled, but then Samuelson was thrusting his arm forward, and Neal felt the blade slice through his jacket and shirt, push through skin and muscle, and the bastard _twisted_ it and something went _SNAP_ and Neal was suddenly on the floor.

“Neal!” Peter was kneeling next to him, and Neal could see he was holding his hand.

“Shit.”

“There’s an ambulance coming – just hold on, OK? GODDAMMIT WE NEED A MEDIC IN HERE!”

“Fuck, fuck, shit, fuckety-fuck-fuck-fuck!” Neal gasped.

“Shh, shh, don’t hurt yourself,” Peter soothed and Neal thought that was maybe the funniest thing he had ever heard, so he laughed. “Neal, Neal, Neal,” Peter _moaned_ , and he was petting Neal’s hand, Neal could see that, but…

“Peter, I can’t feel anything!”

“What?”

Everything was slipping away again, the gradual leaching away of sensation, of awareness, but this time it was different – he wasn’t just numb, it was… nothing. So, the panic was inevitable. “I can’t – I can’t feel my legs or my arms, I – Peter!” 

Then Peter’s hands were on his face, and he could feel _that_ and he could feel the tears from Peter’s eyes splashing on his neck, and he could smell Peter’s breath, sour from the morning’s coffee. And he could see Peter’s face, stricken, in pain, afraid. And he’d sworn to himself that would never happen again, hadn’t he? Peter should not feel this, this panic, this grief. 

So, “Peter, it’s OK,” he said and yeah, his voice was quavering, but he was _having a day_ , and he needed for Peter not to be afraid.

“It’s not OK, don’t leave me. You promised.”

“I’m trying not to.” _Damn it!_

“Neal, God.” Peter was openly crying now, and Neal wanted to tell him not to worry, and not to be afraid, except this always worried Neal, and he sure was scared shitless, but he wasn’t going to tell Peter that part. Except he couldn’t talk anymore, so it didn’t matter, and someone was saying the ambulance was there, but then it all went black anyway.

\----

“Pasta e fagioli.”

“What?”

“I’m in the mood for pasta e fagioli,” Neal said.

“You get up after dying, and those are your first words?” Peter asked from his seat next to the bed, and Neal blinked up at him. They were in a very brightly-lit room – all the blinds were open, and the sunlight was _punishing_ , and Neal could see every wrinkle, every care-line and greying whisker on Peter’s face and it made him stop breathing for a second. He looked so worn-down and just… lost-slash-worried-slash-relieved.

Neal sat up – ignoring the head rush – slipped out of the bed, took Peter’s face in his hands and just kissed him. Peter’s arms slid around his back, his hands warm on the skin bared through the opening at the back of the hospital gown, and when Neal ran out of breath, he just rested his forehead against Peter’s and sighed.

“Yuck, morning breath,” Peter said.

“Fuck you.”

“Dead guy morning breath.”

“Shut _up_!” Neal said and got back into the bed. “Where are we, anyway?”

“A private clinic in Brooklyn Heights that Mozzie found.”

“What’s the story?”

“You’re a dangerous criminal, and this place has more security than any other place,” Peter said.

“Ah.” That would explain the tracker still on his ankle. “Have you been here the whole time?”

Peter didn’t really answer, just slid his eyes to look at the joins in the ceiling. “The staff is very discreet.” 

Neal was adept at reading between-the-lines-Peter, and knew that meant, _They’re very appreciative of the generous bribe Mozzie paid for them to keep their mouths shut and unauthorized visitors away._

“Is El OK?”

“She sends her love.” _She’s not here because I didn’t want to upset her._

“And how are you?”

“I’m not the one who died.” _It’s killing me to watch this happen to you and I’m afraid you won’t come back next time._

“Come here?” Neal held his arms out. 

Peter scoffed, which meant _I really want to, but I’m afraid of what will happen if I do,_ but Neal gave him the “don’t fuck with me” look that Peter himself had used so often on Neal, so he had no choice. Neal scooted over and Peter had to lay practically on top of him for them both to fit in the narrow bed, but he tucked Peter’s head under his chin as best as he could and just held him as he cried himself into an exhausted sleep.

\----

“You’re back!” El said, voice unnaturally chipper as she greeted them later that day. “Want lunch? I was going to make tuna melts.” Her chin was quivering and her eyes were too bright, and Neal had to go and kiss the fear out of her eyes or he might never be able to breathe again.

It was only the next day for Neal, like he’d only gone to bed with a migraine and woke feeling just fine. He thought it may have felt a lot longer for Peter and Elizabeth. 

He pitched in to help her, grating the cheese while she chopped up the celery, and wherever she stood, whatever she did, she was always _touching_ him, her hip against his, or her breasts against his arm as she reached across him to grab a utensil from the crock on the counter, or a hand brushing his back as she went past him to the fridge. And as they waited for the cheese to brown on the sandwiches, keeping an eye on the broiler, Peter would ease through the kitchen, grabbing plates to set the table, he would casually drag a hand over Neal's hand or across his shoulders. All the touching, it was not so very subtle.

He bent over to remove the sheet pan from the oven, and El eased past him, her hip brushing lightly against his ass, and he straightened, deposited the pan on the stove top, and just looked down at her. She regarded him thoughtfully, blue eyes large and expressive, and he loved her so much in that moment it actually hurt. He reached his right hand out to cup her cheek, she tilted her head back and they kissed. She put her hands on his hips to pull him closer, opening her mouth to him, and he ran his left hand up her back to cradle the back of her head, the fingertips of his right still on her jaw, and let her flick her tongue over his, over his teeth, tasting her – she’d recently eaten violet candies.

They parted and she rested her head under his chin. Peter was leaning against the counters, a slight smile on his face as he watched him. “I need you so much right now,” Elizabeth murmured into his sweater, and the tuna melts were left to congeal on the stove as they made their way up the stairs to the bedroom.

They undressed each other as they made their way to the bed, the three of them, El in Neal's arms, kissing him, Peter bringing up the rear, assisting where necessary, getting a kiss in here and there, his body warm against Neal's back. They were naked by the time they reached the bed, El sliding gracefully onto her back, arms beckoning him, knees spread. Neal lowered himself on top of her, their hips aligned, and covered her face with kisses – her lips, her forehead, her eyes. Peter lay stretched out beside them, stroking their sides, adding kisses where they fit. Neal turned his head to kiss Peter, and El reached her hand down between them, taking hold of Neal's cock and stroking it to full hardness.

She had her hands on his hips, pushing on them and rocking hers forward. He pulled away slightly and let her guide his cock inside her. Peter, meanwhile, had positioned himself so that he was lying at El’s head, kind of wrapped around them both protectively, head propped on his hand. Neal leaned forward and caught his mouth in a kiss, and then El ran her hand up his chest, and being with them was so close to perfect, he didn’t quite know what to do.

“You could maybe move some, sport,” El gasped, as if reading his mind, and he snorted with laughter and straightened up a little. He lifted her hips in his hands and began to fuck her in earnest, her legs hooked around his waist. She rocked her hips against him, matching his rhythm. Peter reached over and started tweaking at her nipples, which made her arch her back and clamp down just a little harder on Neal, who groaned his appreciation. 

“Jesus, that’s, that’s…” but he lost his words when Peter’s hand began traveling down El’s body until he was rubbing suddenly and furiously at her clit. 

“Oh, Christ!” she screamed a little, and nuzzled her face against his armpit, mouth open, lower teeth bared. 

“You like that?”

“I think you know what else I’d like,” she gritted out, and Neal paused as Peter’s hand moved to cup over her pussy, his fingers spread around her lips, around Neal, then he began to insert his middle finger along the side of Neal's cock, stretching El wider. Neal had to admit this was a new one on him; the sensation of Peter’s fingers there was distracting and interesting and – wow, was he now trying for a second?

“This OK?” Peter asked, generally, but he was looking at Neal.

“Yeah, I, well, have you manicured lately?”

Peter smirked and pulled his fingers out, went back to rubbing at El’s clit as Neal picked up his pace again.

“Oh my God, I’m so close,” El gasped, and Peter bent down to kiss her, her sweaty hair sticking to his lips and his face. 

“Wait for me,” Neal asked.

“Hurry up, then!”

Neal grinned, threw his head back and pumped into her as she reached her climax, letting himself go with a shout and flopped down on the bed beside her. He crawled up her body when he’d caught his breath, kissed her, kissed Peter and lay down on his side with a happy smile on his face. His eyes moved to Peter’s face, who lay watching them both with eyes hooded with desire, cock turgid and purple against his body. Tired as he was – it had been an eventful 24 hours – Neal pushed himself up on his elbows and raised his ass in the air. 

“Daddy’s turn,” he cooed, shaking his hips suggestively, and El laughed as Peter scowled at them both.

“What, are you starting that now, too?” he groaned, but Neal leaned forward to kiss the scowl away as El went to find lube in the nightstand.

\----

Neal has always been a big believer that the best way to tackle a problem was to ignore it until it pulled a big sulk and went away, but of course, Peter was not, so then there had to be _discussions._ Of _issues_.

“We should have a plan in case this happens again,” Peter said in a low voice. El was sprawled across them both, asleep, so Peter couldn’t see the epic eyeroll that Neal really had been working on for decades.

“I’d like to believe it won’t be such a normal occurrence. I hardly ever die twice in one year.”

“Hardly?”

“OK, never. I told you, it’s only happened twice before, in 1918 and 1941.”

“OK.”

“And maybe at Woodstock, but I mean, I always chalked that up to a bad acid trip, so the jury’s kind of still out –“

“Neal, you’re not making this easier.”

“Sorry. What did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know, but something like that clinic Moz found – some way of making sure your – special circumstances – don’t get discovered by anyone by mistake. I don’t think I have to tell you that there will be serious repercussions if this were to get out.”

“Fine. I’ll talk to Moz, see about putting some people on retainer. You’d be surprised how much a little money can buy.”

“Wait a minute, how’s he going to pay for it? I don’t want him pulling any jobs for you.”

“Relax, the money’ll be mine.”

Peter sighed. “Neal, don’t make me repeat myself.”

Neal sighed too. “Peter, don’t be such a pill. I’ve got a rainy day fund.”

“Rainy day fund?”

“Well, you don’t live for 124 years and not make a few investments. I got in on Google on the ground floor.”

“Of course you did. How much is in this ‘rainy day fund’?”

“Last I checked, about $130 million, but I really took a bath in the last economic downturn, so-“

Neal could almost hear Peter mentally counting to ten. “You have $130 million, and you pull two-bit cons and forge bonds for what – kicks?”

“Have to keep things interesting, Peter.”

“Oh my God, I need a drink,” Peter said, extricating himself from under Elizabeth and heading for the bedroom door. 

“Oh, hey, while you’re up, can you order some food? I was promised pasta e fagioli.”

The pillow was easy to duck.

\----

Neal turned out to be correct – he didn’t die again that year at all. It took another eight months.

It was a case that just fell into their laps, and it was a doozy. Reggie Hesher, a two-bit hustler that turned up like a bad penny in Neal and Moz’s lives every couple of years, approached Neal with a proposition. 

“So there’s this guy, right? And he’s about to pull a major heist. And word is they need a boxman. So I thoughta you, Caffrey.”

“Uh-huh,” Neal said. “What’re you looking for, Heshie?”

“Nothing. You know. Couple or tree hunderd.”

“Uh-huh. You want a referral fee?”

“For the effort, Neal, come on.”

Despite Heshie’s general squirrelliness and usual lack of trustworthiness, the tip had been a good one, and Neal was chosen for the job by Nate Bergmann, AKA “The Continental,” a criminal known more for his work conning trust fund babies in Europe than for bank jobs in the US, but who seemed to be branching out. Neal wanted to know how a guy got a name like “The Continental,” but never had the balls to ask, because Bergmann seemed to be kind of a scary-crazy dude that made Matthew Keller look like a boy scout, and Neal preferred to just keep his head down for this one.

The job turned out to be a heist at the First National branch on the Upper West Side that had the singular distinction of housing in its extensive vaults the art, jewelry and other valuables of New York’s more prominent citizens. The plan was to stage an armed robbery on the commercial operation that fronted the branch, which was to be a diversion for the real heist that would be occurring in the basement-level vaults. Apparently, Bergmann had gotten his hands on the plans for the bank’s security system, which led to him forming a crew for this job.

Neal spent weeks studying the specs of the security system and the mechanics of the vaults themselves, planning out workarounds of the various fail safes he found and expected to find, and hoping the bank hadn’t added any bells or whistles to the system since Bergmann got them more than six months prior. Peter accused him of getting wood every time he looked at the specs, but this was perhaps the most sophisticated system he’d ever seen, and he was going to be the guy to hack it, so yeah, maybe there was some chubbing-up. Not that he’d admit it.

The day of the job, Neal and Bergmann arrived first thing in the morning, their cover a visit from the bank’s central IT department to install a network upgrade. This would put them at the southwest corner of the building, where they could gain access to the vaults. The bank was being staffed by a crew of FBI agents, and most of their clients’ valuables had gradually been removed for safekeeping elsewhere, at the insistence of the bank and at a cost of much hair from Peter’s head. In the weeks leading up to the heist, the bank was still being cased by Bergmann’s crew, and getting the materials out of the vaults undetected had been a lesson in patience. Neal teased that Peter would be having nightmares about the paperwork for weeks.

Neal worked away at the drywall at the back corner of the server room with a reciprocating saw, cutting a hole large enough for him, Bergmann and their equipment to shimmy down to the level below before the scheduled bank robbery at 10:00 a.m. The vault on the lower level had one main door for entry and a series of smaller ones for each individual room. The main door, a 4-ton behemoth from the 1920’s, was on an independent system, and so it was just easier if they were on the other side of it before the lockdown that would be kicked off by the robbery, and they had about 15 minutes to get there. It was actually the biggest risk of the whole sting – not counting, you know, the _armed gunmen_ – because Neal had to work the timing according to schedule yet still vamp until the FBI could mop up all the bad guys, Bergmann included. 

Piece of cake, right?

And it went off without a hitch. Except for the fact that the FBI agents apparently couldn’t get to Neal and Bergmann in what amounted to any kind of a timely fashion, and so Neal was forced to actually go on with the break-in of the security system. And dammit if he didn’t do it in a time that was more than two minutes faster than any of the simulations they’d run. But then they got into the first vault, and the inventory they’d expected to find there… wasn’t. 

“Just what the fock is happening here?” Bergmann said, and really, Swedish guys shouldn't curse.

“I don’t –“ Neal said slowly.

“We’ve been double-crossed.”

“What? How?” Neal figured righteous indignation should be the code of the day.

A loud clanging somewhere behind them signified the opening of the main vault door, and then someone yelled, “Federal agents!” and it all went to hell. 

Bergmann pulled an automatic weapon from somewhere and handed it to Neal, grabbed one for himself and ran out of the vault yelling the Swedish equivalent of “Banzai!” or some Viking bullshit and Neal stood staring at the weapon in his hands as the FBI sprayed bullets all over the damn place. 

The kicker was that he actually saw the look on the face of the probie whose bullet blew Neal’s skull wide open, and the kid looked like he _felt really bad about it._

\----

Neal's never been a clingy or needy person, not really, but when he revived this time, and Peter was just _there,_ standing over him looking concerned, he pulled his lover into an embrace that he knew must have crushed the air out of him, but he really just needed to _feel Peter’s arms around him now_.

“Hey, it’s OK,” Peter soothed, even though it was really not, because the dying and the fear and the never knowing if this would be the last time or not was scaring the shit out of Neal and he just couldn’t handle it in that moment.

“Hold me, hold me, please,” Neal begged and so Peter practically scooped him up in his arms, Neal's face buried in Peter’s neck with his eyes closed and his arms around Peter’s torso like a baby spider monkey.

“I’m sorry,” he said eventually, pulling away. He reached over and ran cool fingertips over a mark on Peter’s neck – when had he bitten him?

“Don’t be. Don’t ever be.”

“Is El here? I need her, I need to see her –“ And the panic rose in his chest again, but Peter laid a hand on him, right in the middle of his chest, and it was so warm and solid and reassuring, that he was finally able to get his shit wrapped up tight. 

When they got home later that afternoon, Neal learned he had been out for nearly a week (“It takes a while to regenerate brain tissue, babe,” Peter had pronounced, as if he knew what the fuck he was talking about), and the issue of how to explain it all to the extended team who’d been in on the operation had already been explained away (“It’s a good thing the kid that did it was so freaked out – makes a person suggestible.”).

But Peter’s eyes told a different story, and it would be a while before Neal would learn what it was. 

In the meantime, he spent his days relining the cupboards in the Burkes’ kitchen and rearranging their closets, and even Satchmo started rolling his eyes. El finally had to start calming him with midday sex and, well: score.

It seemed to Neal like a month off was a reasonable time to recover from a traumatic brain injury, so he was back in the saddle at the White Collar division for maybe two days before shit started hitting fans again.

“Who’s that guy?” Neal asked Diana as a very serious man with a very serious entourage swept into their offices and headed straight for Hughes’ office.

“Bill Nance,” she answered, and Neal didn’t know if the tone in her voice signified her awe or disgust. “Some big, swinging dick out of Organized Crime.” So: disgust.

“What’s he doing down here?” Organized Crime occupied two floors at the top of the building, and included the cream of the crop among FBI agents. So naturally, they were arrogant pricks.

“Hell if I know.”

Then Neal got the double-finger-point from Hughes, and he found out for himself.

“Absolutely, fucking _not_ ,” Peter said through a jaw so clenched, Neal feared for his molars.

“What? I asked nicely,” Nance pointed out, hands spread. He was a man accustomed to getting what he wanted, Neal could tell, and what he wanted was to borrow Neal for a case. 

“The terms of his CI agreement are very clear –“

“And open to some interpretation. There’s a sentence in there under job description – duties as assigned by manager. I always liked that one; it means I can send the probies for coffee, ha-ha.” No one else laughed. 

“That’s right, and _I’m_ his manager, and I say no.”

Nance appealed to Hughes, who honestly looked torn between his loyalty to his people – and the fact that sentiment covered Neal made him feel kind of good, if only for a second – and his duty to the Bureau. “Let Nance outline the case first,” he suggested. “We’ll leave it up to Neal to decide.”

Suddenly all eyes were on Neal, and there was no way he could say no at this point. Besides, his curiosity was piqued. 

The case was a very long-running investigation of the Capuano crime family in Connecticut, and though they had placed a few undercover agents already – the number was strictly need-to-know – there had arisen an opportunity where certain skills of Neal’s would come in handy. 

“What’s the job?”

It appeared that Johnny “The Executioner” Capuano, heir apparent to the family business, was looking for a portraitist to paint him and his wife and children. This was a rare opportunity to put a person very close to Johnny himself, if only for a short while, and Nance wanted to exploit it to plant surveillance devices throughout the house. 

Neal asked to talk it over with Peter before making a decision. “You’re not liking this – why?” 

“Well, for starters, these guys are dangerous, Neal.”

“They’re all dangerous, Peter.”

“Yeah, well, this guy’s got ‘executioner’ in his job title, so…”

“There’s something more.”

“It’s Nance, I don’t trust him, I never have. We went through the Academy together and he was always a sneaky little shit. He’s been sniffing around you for weeks, and I thought I’d warned him off, but now he’s come to Hughes with a big case. I think he’s trying to poach you.”

Neal suddenly understood some of the more-worried-than-usual looks he’d been getting from Peter lately. “You think he knows about me?” Neal asked, and he could feel his stomach clenching.

“I don’t know anything, but that probie Mike Ward that shot you? Nance got his hooks into him, started asking too many questions, making him remember. I heard a rumor there’s an offer for him to join their team. Guys three months out of the Academy don’t get asked to join OC, Neal.”

“Shit.”

“I guess you don’t shoot a guy in the head and let it lie. He knows he got you, Neal, I just thought I’d convinced him it was a glancing shot. Dammit, I thought we took care of this, Hughes and I. I’m sorry, Neal.”

“Listen, listen, Peter. We don’t have a clue about what Nance knows or doesn’t know. And the way I see it, we don’t have much choice. If you and Hughes say no, Nance’ll go to the AD or higher, and get what he wants anyway.”

“You’re probably right.”

“And, I mean, this is only one case, and if it means they can bring down a whole lot of bad guys, I think I’m in.” If he kept saying it, he’d believe it. “I’m in, Peter, because someone else? Doesn’t have my safety net.”

“Neal.” Peter put his hands on Neal’s shoulders and looked into his eyes, and dammit, concern for one’s life was a huge turn-on. “This is serious. I don’t know if it’s a bridge you want to cross, do you know what you’re saying?”

“Of course I do. Better me than someone else who might be killed. It’s called ‘sacrifice,’ Peter.”

“It’s called exploitation too, Neal. And I swore to myself it wouldn’t happen.”

Neal glanced around – they seemed to be alone in the hallway, so he leaned up and kissed Peter quickly on the jaw. “It’s only exploitation if I don’t want to do it,” he pointed out and went to tell Nance he was in.

\----

“The Executioner,” it turned out, was a big softie, with a palpable affection for his wife and kids that Neal was surprised to see during their many sittings for the portrait he was painting. He was also pretty damn handy with a fillet knife, which Neal was not so surprised to see, later.

“You’re gonna tell me who else the Feds have inside my organization, and you’re gonna be happy to do it, Halden,” Capuano was saying to Neal, who sat tied to a chair like this was a fucking James Bond movie as the man carved slices off of his body like he was a Christmas goose. Neal hated goose – so greasy.

“No fucking way,” Neal tried to say, but the blood bubbling out of his mouth made proper diction impossible. And where the hell was Nance and his boys – Neal had said the panic phrase more than an hour ago.

But finally there was a bang, and a yell, and “Federal agents! Nobody move!” rang out through the abandoned warehouse they’d brought him to, and Neal nearly fainted with relief. 

“Jesus!” Nance exclaimed as he came in and caught sight of Neal as that quisling Ward was trying to untie him from the chair; apparently Neal's blood had slicked up the ropes and they were proving troublesome. “Somebody call a medic!”

“Caffrey, I –“ Nance said, looking down on him, and at least he had the grace to look horrified and shocked, “I’m sorry.”

Neal spat blood at his shoes, twice. “Where the hell were you?” he wheezed angrily around the hole in his lung. “You back your own men up this half-assed, or just me because I’m an ex-con?”

“Caffrey –“

“Fuck you,” Neal managed before passing out. He came to again in the ambulance, sometime later, wishing he really had died this time. “Where are you taking me?” he asked the EMT around the oxygen mask.

“Mercy General.”

“Don’t suppose I could ask you to take me to Brooklyn Heights?”

“Not today,” he replied, clearly thinking Neal was delirious.

By the time Peter arrived, Neal had already been taken in for surgery to repair his internal damage – a waste of time and resources, as Neal regenerated after an injury as he did from a fatality – so they didn’t have a chance to talk until the anesthetic wore off.

“Peter?” Neal whispered once the breathing tube was removed, his throat raw and dry in its absence.

“Yeah?”

“You were right. Nance is a sneaky little shit.” And then he fell asleep again.

When he woke, it was the next morning and he felt almost normal. Sitting up in bed, he felt his stitches pulling at flesh they no longer needed to keep together. 

“You in pain?” Peter said, noting his wince.

“Just these stitches,” Neal said, picking at one on his shoulder ineffectually. “They pull.”

“We’ll have it taken care of at the clinic once the transfer order comes through.” Peter’s expression was unreadable.

Neal stared at the ceiling and smiled despite his feelings of foreboding when Peter took his hand and just sat there with him.

“Is it raining out?” Neal asked.

“We’re going to talk about the weather now?”

“How screwed am I?”

“Jury’s still out.”

“Fucking Nance,” one of them said, maybe both.

Fucking Nance showed up an hour later with a box of salt water taffy and a balloon.

“Seriously?” Neal asked. 

Peter just looked murderous. “How dare you show your face here, Nance? I saw the transcripts. 75 minutes to muster the team to pull Neal out? You’re lucky he didn’t die.”

“So lodge a complaint,” he said and wow, he was going with “arrogant prick” at a time like this? Neal admired his ability to stick to a persona. 

“Hughes already gave the Assistant Director an earful.”

“And we brought down a dangerous criminal, and are in the midst of dismantling an entire crime organization. We’ll see which issue the AD pays more attention to.”

“Remind me to kill you later,” Peter gritted through his teeth, and there was actual spit flying and Neal worried for his blood pressure, seriously. He put a hand on Peter’s arm, which made him back off but didn’t seem to calm him.

“Why are you here, exactly?” Neal asked.

“To check up on you. You’re looking remarkably well for a guy who was at death’s door less than a day ago.”

“I’m a quick healer.”

“Very quick,” Nance said as he dumped the candy onto a chair and left, the gleam in his eye telling them both he knew exactly how quick a healer Neal was.

\----

The next time Neal died, it wasn’t even real. And that was because he had people who loved him, and who he loved enough to trust with his secrets.

But first. First there was a lot of unpleasantness.

Neal's “recuperation” was good for a two week break at home, and he spent his days playing board games with Moz and Elizabeth (who really? Was the all-time Risk champion) and his nights in the reassuring arms of his lovers. Always there was the expectation of the other shoe eventually materializing, and it did after lunch on his second day back, to kick him right in the ass. 

“Shit, what’s Nance doing up there with Hughes and Peter?” he asked Diana, noticing the three men in the conference room beside Peter’s office. 

“What do _you_ think?”

“I think it can’t be good for my health.”

“I think your thinking is correct. Don’t do it, Neal.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever it is Nance wants. He sees you as cannon fodder, and it’s not right.”

Neal looked down at her, shocked, but her eyes were on the email she was typing. “I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” he said slowly.

Her eyes met his and he saw how wrong he was. “I think I’ve seen enough of your blood to refill you twice,” she said, low enough so that only he could hear her. 

“Di –“

“It’s none of my business. Just like your affair with the boss and his wife is _none of my business_.”

“Neal?” Peter called from the now-open door of the conference room. 

Neal gestured that he’d be there in a minute and looked down at Diana. 

“ _None_ of my business, Neal,” she repeated. “Now go and stick up for yourself.”

As it turned out, he didn’t get the chance.

When he arrived, Peter was standing at the windows, staring out of them moodily, and Hughes wouldn’t look at him. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Nance smiled at him like a shark eyeing a guppy. “Your work on the Capuano case hasn’t gone unnoticed, Neal, congratulations!”

Neal didn’t even respond, merely stared at him. 

“I’ve asked Agent Hughes if we might extend your time with us up in OC – there’s a new investigation ramping up that I think you’d be perfect for. Domestic terrorists – you’ll love it.”

“No.”

“Come now, Neal, you don’t even know the details.”

“I don’t like your way of working cases, Agent, it gets people killed.”

Nance actually laughed. “Why so upset, Neal? We all know you’re very special in _that_ respect.” With that comment, all three sets of eyes were on Nance, since there was no mistaking now he knew or had guessed at Neal's situation.

“See here, Nance,” Hughes began, standing, his face reddening with indignation. “I will not have you mistreating my people so egregiously. We all know how much you screwed the pooch on that Capuano sting, and if Neal had been anyone else, you’d be looking at censure and a suspension.”

“Except Neal _isn’t_ anyone else, is he? I have eye witnesses and autopsy reports that say he’s died at least twice in the last year. And if you think I’m stupid enough to buy the story he was undercover with the Secret Service, or that Ward’s bullet just grazed his skull, you’ve got another thing coming.

“How can you both sit here ignoring what you’ve got under your noses? He’s the eighth wonder of the world, a man who does not die. He’s the goddamn Energizer Bunny.”

Peter turned suddenly and loomed over the seated man, his face mere inches away, livid with rage, yet his voice was calm, clipped. Neal had only ever seen him this angry once – when Elizabeth had been kidnapped – and he was grateful it wasn’t being aimed at him this time. “He’s _my_ Energizer Bunny, and don’t you forget it.”

But Nance got up and got right back in Peter’s face, his voice low and dangerous. “Do I have to remind you that Caffrey's deal is with this agency and not you personally, Agent Burke? And if he fails to fulfill his obligations, if he’s seen to be lacking by anyone in the chain of command, including my new bestie, the Assistant Director, then it’s back to prison with him, no questions asked.”

“Then send me to prison,” Neal said quietly.

Nance smiled, a mirthless expression that looked more like a grimace on his florid face. “I don’t think you want me to do that, Neal. You see, I recently made another very good friend – you may know him? Special Agent Philip Kramer? He shared some interesting data with me.”

“You bastard,” Peter breathed. Neal’s eyes flicked to his lover’s face then back to Nance, realization that he was looking at both the rock and the hard place suddenly dawning.

“There’s enough to put you away for life, Neal, and I imagine that’s a bleak prospect for a man such as you.”

Neal closed his eyes; this was not happening.

“Come on, Neal, think about my offer, and think about the alternative,” Nance said with a smirk. “And while you’re at it, think about the other agents’ lives and safety you’d be ensuring whenever you take one for the team. And another one. And another.”

“Dammit, this is a man’s life you’re playing with!” Hughes shouted then, surprising them all with the volume and vehemence he put into his words.

But Nance only laughed. “Are you hearing yourself?” He headed for the door. “I’ll give you until the weekend to think about it.”

“Neal,” Peter began once Nance was gone, his voice choked, his face stricken.

Neal held up a hand to silence him, shook his head once and then left the office.

He didn’t know where he was going, just that the walls of the White Collar unit were suddenly too confining and he needed some fresh air. In New York. Jeez, he had to move to Colorado or some shit next time. He needed mountains.

Before he realized it, he found himself at the Burkes’ front door. He let himself in, and there was Elizabeth, working at her desk in the kitchen. She spun in her chair to speak to him, “Oh, hi, honey, I was just going to call to see what you and Peter wanted for dinner –“ 

But Neal sank to his knees in front of her, slipped his arms around her legs and laid his head in her lap.

“Neal? Honey, what’s wrong?”

He shook his head – he was too numb to form coherent words, and all he knew was that he needed to feel her kindness and her love or he might just – “El, El, El,” he sobbed into her leg, and she held him as he wept like he hadn’t since he’d lost his beloved Josie almost 95 years ago.

Because how do you explain to someone you love more than breathing that you have to leave? How do you tell her that the alternative is a life of pain and death and exploitation with no end in sight? How do you explain you’d do it anyway, because at least you got to feel her arms around you when you returned each time? How do you tell her you see what it does to her and to her husband, to know that they die a little each time you do?

“I’m just so lost,” was all he could say, and she took his face in her hands, kissed him and led him upstairs, put him to bed and petted his hair until he fell asleep. 

When he woke, he was alone, the long shadows in the room telling him the sun had just gone down. He didn’t think he felt any better, but at least he didn’t feel any worse. Throwing on some jeans, he padded down the stairs into an ambush.

“We’ve got a plan,” Moz said to him almost before Neal registered his friend was sitting in the living room.

El nodded sagely from behind her mug of tea and Neal looked at her questioningly. “Peter told me about your meeting with Nance, and Moz and I have been… discussing options.”

“This isn’t like that time when you pretended to be FBI agents at that strip club?” Neal began, feeling his head reel just a little.

El actually said “Pshaw,” and then she blew air out of her mouth, ruffling her bangs adorably, and she actually looked confident. Adorably confident. 

_What the hell_ , Neal thought, _he might as well play along_. “What’s the plan?”

\-----

“Here’s the plan – you cut your anklet and you run like hell,” Peter said almost before he’d gotten inside the door late that night after spending hours with Hughes trying and failing to find a way around Nance’s ultimatum. He put his hands on Neal's arms, squeezing his biceps, so earnest. “You’ve got aliases already, right? Well, you run like hell and you don’t look back, Neal.” He shook Neal a little then, his grip suddenly so tight it hurt, and Neal looked down at Peter’s hands.

“Ouch.”

“Oh, sorry.” Peter let him go self-consciously. “You should start packing. Now.” He headed towards the stairs as if he might do the packing for Neal himself.

“Honey, wait!” El said, and caught up to him. “We already have a plan.”

Peter’s eyes flicked from El to Neal to Moz. “Who does?”

“I do. With Moz. We’ve already worked it out.”

“What do you mean you’ve _already_ worked it out?”

She gave him a long-suffering look. “Honey, you married an event planner – there is always a Plan B.”

“This isn’t’ like that time at the strip club, is it?”

Moz sat forward on the couch, ignoring him, face alight with energy. “Well, it’s going to take some time and maneuvering to get all our ducks in a row, but if Neal can lend a hand, and you can get some of the demi-Suits to pitch in, we’ll be golden.”

And then he and El laid it all out for him. 

“Is there a Plan C?” Peter asked when they were done. “Don’t tell me you’d go along with this?” he asked Neal.

“It’s crazy enough to work.”

“Don’t say that. People only say that in movies. It’s crazy enough to send us all to prison for many, many years.”

“You’re only saying that because it’s true,” Neal replied. 

In the end, Peter agreed to it, but only because Neal thought he was too tired and worn down. Hell, so was Neal – maybe they’d reconsider by the cold light of day.

When the cold light of day turned into the cold light of the next day and the next, it was clear that time was running out, and Neal had to answer Nance’s ultimatum. Having no other options, Plan B became official. 

“All right, Nance, I’m yours,” Neal said on Friday. They were with Hughes and Peter in Hughes’ office “But there are stipulations.”

Nance looked amused but humored him. “They are?”

“That he can still consult on White Collar cases, and that his desk stays down here with us,” Hughes said. He was standing, with his best Imposing Boss look on his face. “The _Director_ was surprisingly amenable when we had lunch yesterday,” he added.

Nance raised an eyebrow. “This your way of trying to keep him?”

“It’s our way of trying to keep him safe, Nance. I don’t like your methods, and I don’t like you. Neal stays here even as he works for you. Case closed.”

Nance looked like he had a lot more to say, but kept his mouth shut. 

“Peter, there are still a few active cases Neal is working, are there not?” Hughes continued.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then Agent Nance will be able to avail himself of Neal's services as soon as they’ve been concluded.”

“You can’t delay this forever, Hughes,” Nance said, rising.

“But I can have fun trying,” Hughes said dismissively and Nance left the room. 

Neal just stared at Hughes for a few seconds, touched. “Sir,” he began.

Hughes made a gesture, cutting him off. “All I’ve done is delay the inevitable. Tell me this plan you have will keep Neal safe, Peter.”

Neal owed somebody a huge muffin basket.

Before Neal left for the day, he paused at Hughes’ office door, shuffling his feet. “What is it, Caffrey?” he said, impatient.

“I – thank you, sir.”

Hughes looked at him then, and his face softened. “I’m not going to pretend to understand what happens to you, Neal – what you are, what it means. But one thing I do know is that as far as I can tell, you’ve conducted yourself with honor and integrity while you’ve been a member of this unit. When I came up, that meant something.”

Neal could feel actual tears forming. “Sir –“

“Now get the hell out of my office, you’ve got casework to get back to.”

\----

So this was the setup: One of the active cases Peter and Neal were working was the investigation into a health insurance fraud ring based in Queens. This was a real case, and it was open, but unfortunately the doctor at the core of it seemed to have fled to one of the ‘stans. Fortunately, Nance didn’t happen to know this.

The doctor in question also owned a chain of fast food franchises that had been seized by the IRS. The fast food restaurants were currently closed and abandoned, most of their assets seized, which presented a convenient place to enact their plan, if a few casual counts of arson among friends could be discounted.

Because Mozzie and Elizabeth’s plan? Was to blow Neal up.

Actually, the explosion was El’s idea; never let it be said she couldn’t go big (“No wait, you can’t look for a man who’s no longer _there_ \- it’s brilliant!”). How they pulled it off was Moz’s baby (“A little natural gas leak, a little plastic explosive – what’s not to love?”). Their target was Diana’s recommendation (“It’s a Chick-Fil-A – they’re anti-gay marriage. We’ll be making a statement.”). And at least Peter could buy in somewhat (“Fine, fine – the building’s a good 100 yards from anything around it. I guess so, why not.”).

It all went off without a hitch. Mostly. Because as it turned out, when Moz asked Neal to lend a hand with the planning? He meant it literally. 

“If you’re going to blow a guy to bits, you need bits of guy, Neal, God!” he’d said condescendingly, as if Neal were simple.

But all the groundwork was laid by Diana – fake emails between the doctor and them, offering a meeting; a call into the gas company from a concerned neighbor reporting a gas leak, faked comms and orders. Moz took care of the explosion easily enough – and Neal was going to have to talk to him about this sudden facility with blowing things up, really. Peter supervised the harvesting and planting of the “DNA evidence” which might have given him nightmares for a week, and El made a nice lasagna for everyone to enjoy later.

And so Neal sat uncomfortably across the street from his own funeral again, his left hand – correction: stump – bound and in a sling, aching horribly and itchy, but clearly healing. He knew it wouldn’t be long before it regenerated, though there was a moment as it was being removed – one last commission for Mozzie’s cadre of ethically flexible medical personnel – when he’d doubted it. 

He knew he was taking a huge chance coming here, his second funeral in just under two years, but as before, he couldn’t stay away. He needed to see it for himself, because this time it was an ending of sorts – for him, anyway, because he’d have to say goodbye to New York, this time for real.

\----

**Two Years Later**

Neal stands in the doorway of the deck, watching the sun complete its slow dip behind the mountains that ring the western shore of Lake Tahoe. It’s quiet here, which is something he finds he likes after so many decades in cities. Time passes here… slowly, so slowly it is as if it doesn’t exist. 

This is all right by Neal, because for once, time is not something he curses, even if it’s not something he embraces. It just _is_. Neither friend nor foe. He prefers it that way.

He turns his head at a sigh behind him, and he regards Peter wordlessly; he’s awake now, looking debauched and perfect, naked and sprawled on their bed, a sheet barely covering his crotch. His eyes glitter in the dying sunlight and he smiles; Neal returns the smile and goes back to watching the sunset.

It’s moments like this when he finds it nearly impossible to remember what he’d fled from, what they’d all left behind in New York like a burden. Peter had taken early retirement from the FBI in the wake of Neal’s final demise, but not before kicking off an OPR investigation into Nance’s investigative methods that led to his eventually being expelled from the agency. El had sold Burke Premier Events and then made it her business to find this house and decorate it to within an inch of its existence. She needed projects, and Neal needed to indulge her. 

He looks at her fondly, asleep on her side beside Peter, with her hands clasped under her chin, as if in prayer, head tilted to the side as if she’s just about to say something, and he suddenly realizes something that’s been a growing awareness in his mind for months, but that he can only now give a name to. It was worth it.

It was all worth it – the long years of loneliness, the grief, the cutting himself off from anyone who might get too close. It all made him ready for this moment, this life, these people, and he will be eternally grateful for it. 

These people love him, unconditionally, and he loves them back. And come hell or high water, he knows he’ll stay with them until their lives end, and after their loss starts to hurt him less, he’ll find more people just like them. Because they have restored in Neal the capacity to feel, and to love, and to _grieve_ , and that’s something he gave up a long time ago, without realizing how much it had cost him. 

And he’ll never give it up again.

\----

Thank you for your time.


End file.
